Online forums, not quite gone, not quite forgotten

25 August 2026

There’s an idea the old discussion forums, once a fixture on the web, fell out of favour because after a decade or two, people wanted a change. Social media was that change, and we all flocked there.

But from the late nineties (though they’d been around earlier), through to maybe the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, online forums were the place to meet and interact with others.

They weren’t always the most civil of places, like social media today, but it seemed like you didn’t need to be an influencer to be noticed. Plus you chose what to read, or not, no algorithm involved.

Fast forward to today, and forums are not so common, though there’s still a few going that are also quite active. Boards.ie, a forum based in Ireland, is one example that comes to mind.

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technology, trends, web history

No brainer: is consciousness a natural quality of the universe?

24 August 2026

Christof Koch, a German-American neuroscientist, posits consciousness is an attribute of the universe, rather than something spawned by creatures possessed of a brain.

Although somewhat left of field, the notion has raised eye-brows.

Yet if consciousness is universal, so to speak, can any entity capable of reasoning, perceiving, learning, creating, and what not, eventually, somehow, become conscious?

Few people think AI could ever achieve consciousness, but what of AGI, were that ever to come into being? If we were to take this idea to its logical, yet absurd outcome, that is.

Does lower sugar consumption reduce cancer risk in some people?

24 August 2026

Research conducted in the UK found people born during World War II and for several years afterwards, were less likely to be afflicted by some forms of cancer, later in life.

During the war years, and for almost a decade afterwards, sugar was rationed in UK.

The prevalence of some types of cancer: breast, prostate, liver, rectal, and lung, rose however in people born after the early 1950’s, once the availability of sugar returned to normal.

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food, health, science

WordPress.com Education, supporting, encouraging younger bloggers

21 August 2026

WordPress.com Education, is an initiative launched earlier week, designed to give school students across the world resources to setup and maintain their own blog:

This isn’t a stripped-down classroom version of WordPress.com. The Student Plan includes plugin support, 6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync. Students learn and build with many of the same tools they’ll encounter working with WordPress professionally.

The student plan, which includes everything that comes with the free WordPress.com blogs, together with the subscription personal and premium plans, is free for the first year.

For sure, WordPress has its naysayers, but anything that encourages people, particularly school students, to give social media a rest, and engage more fully with the web, can only be a good thing.

Getting started as a blogger, which is the main thing, is simplified with out-of-the-box products like WordPress.com. Once someone has reached a certain level of proficiency they can always look into other options for publishing blogs and websites.

AI and apps, the tools used in 2026 to apply for work

20 August 2026

I can’t remember the last time I applied for a permanent full-time job, but it was in the years soon after I left school. I held a couple of these sorts of jobs, but have pretty much worked freelance since. Leads there have come through people I know, or even disassociated.

It’s fair to say I have no idea what the — for want of a better word — formal process is today.

The last time I had what most people would probably consider to a be a “normal” job interview, I sat before a three-person panel. Needless to say things are quite different in 2026, as Millie Muroi writes (in a pay-walled article) for The Sydney Morning Herald.

One-third of Australian companies are said to use AI in their recruiting today. And if the experience of applying for work, in this instance a casual role at a large Australian discount department store chain, is anything to go by, it seems you don’t encounter a single person. At least initially.

The process, which Muroi partly filmed (not pay-walled), involves typing responses to questions posed by an AI chatbot, from wherever you happen to be. No need to show up in person anymore. She later received an email offering some “personalised” insights, which was AI generated.

It is claimed this practice means everyone’s applications are “seen”, and responded to. Is that a plus?

I expect the recruiting stage conducted by the AI chatbot results in a shortlist of candidates, who, following vetting by a person in HR, would then go in for a face-to-face meeting.

I doubt white-collar recruitment occurs in the quite the same fashion, though AI no doubt sifts through applications, which probably have to be lodged through LinkedIn. Fingers crossed my current line of work holds up, as job hunting using LinkedIn is not something I would relish.

AI companies using rare books to train agents, while destroying them

19 August 2026

Emanuel Maiberg, writing for 404 Media:

A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.

It’s one thing to use books to train AI without seeking the author’s permission, nor paying a royalty, but is there any need to destroy them as part of the process?

There is the point that being rare books, they may be older publications, and copyright has lapsed, but that still seems to be beside the point. I was about to suggest these titles be donated to schools or libraries, once no longer needed, but they’ve likely no longer in one piece.

Going further, the process strikes me as being a form of book burning. The AI companies are taking all sorts of liberties with copyrighted material, but destroying books takes bad form to new lows.

AI slop exposes fraudulent publishing offer to Australian author Mary Colussi

18 August 2026

Touch Grass, the debut novel of Sydney based Australian author Mary Colussi, was published in June this year. And a fraudulent publishing deal was not too far behind. In this instance though AI slop played a part in giving the scam away.

An email sent to Colussi, apparently from a representative of a well-known publishing house in the UK, was full of praise for Touch Grass. Curiously though comments about the novel’s plot were limited only to what had been published online in its synopsis.

This despite claims by the publishing house rep that they’d read the book. Their AOL (once America Online) email address was also something of a give away, to say nothing of the request for money in exchange for a publishing deal.

While this wasn’t the best executed fraud attempt, as AI agents evolve their efforts will no doubt become more convincing. But asking an author to pay to be published would still arouse suspicion.

Traditional publishing houses do not ask writers for money, rather they pay out in the form of an advance. The objective of these scams though is catch people — particularly newcomers to the industry — off guard, and this is where they might succeed.

Is a comeback nigh for the tradie to CEO cappuccino?

18 August 2026

A few years ago I did an online coffee quiz. Highly scientific no doubt. My taste in coffee was — because I’m primarily a cappuccino drinker — adjudged to be “entry level”. Nice.

I occasionally partake of other varieties, like short black or piccolo, but they’re just a little light on coffee (and froth, and chocolate). I was surprised though to lean that Millennials, and Generation X coffee drinkers, are said to be ordering more capps recently. Gen X gets a few things right.

An article in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Food section, with a headline proclaiming “cappuccinos won’t give you street cred” is pay-walled — an article about cappuccinos pay-walled, what can I say? — but you can catch the gist on Good Food’s Instagram page.

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Australia, coffee, trends

AI scrapers use bogus URL tracking tags to make website visits seem legit

17 August 2026

Screenshot of disassociated.com web analytics app, showing two examples of bogus tracking tags referred to in this article.

It looks like AI scrapers have been using a surreptitious method of making their marauding presence appear legitimate, this time by appending a bogus query parameter, or tracking tag, to the URL of the webpage they are targeting.

In the last month or so, I have seen a stack of page visit items looking something like this:
https://disassociated.com/?ref=yourwebsitepage/213page/page/page/ 14page/16page/page/2page…

I’ve replaced the actual website name with the generic yourwebsite marker in the above example.

What is particularly insidious though, is the way the crawlers are using the names of reputable websites and blogs that have linked to disassociated in the past.

Initially I thought some of these blogs had mentioned my website again, but after having a closer look at them, this is not the case. There’s also the detail that my web analytics app does not identify a referring page from the website supposedly sending visitors my way.

The frequency of visits doesn’t stack up either. I’m sure the blogs cited in the /?ref= parameter, that are supposed to be linking here, have many (human) readers, but I can’t imagine every last person, sometimes thousands of them, have been clicking through to my website.

Another possibility was my website had been shared in a newsletter. Usually though the URL query, or UTM parameter, I see in newsletters are along the lines of say ?utm_content, or ?utm_source.

One of the query parameters seen in the screenshot from my web analytics app does is ?utm_source though. However, with one exception I think, none the cited websites publish newsletters.

Also, if any of the cited websites were legitimately sending traffic here using a tracking tag, I doubt they’d use such a nonsensical URL path… page/14page/16page/page/2page… what?

It does puzzles me why these scrapers only seem to be targeting the front page of my website. Only a small amount of the total content posted here is visible there. But they’re AI bots, no doubt they know what they’re doing.

In the meantime, I’ll have to get used to seeing these analytics entries until I can figure out a way to block or mask them. That might be easier to say than do though.

But kudos (ironically) to Claude for acknowledging disassociated in response to a query about the Tiny Awards, in the above image. It’s much appreciated, truly, but doesn’t happen often enough.

IC 1101 is the largest galaxy identified, so far, in the universe

14 August 2026

Located one-point-one-five billion light years from Earth, the behemoth galaxy, at one-point-seven-million light in years in length, somewhat dwarfs our home, the Milky Way, which measures in at a mere one-hundred-thousand light years across.

Using kiloparsecs as a metric, the size difference between IC 1101 and the Milk Way, the comparison comes into sharp focus, at five-hundred-and-twenty kiloparsecs versus thirty to fifty, respectively.

For reference, a kiloparsec equates to one-thousand paresecs. A paresec is three-point-two-six light years, not quite the distance from the Sun and Alpha Centauri, the closest star to Earth.

IC 1101 however is minute beside Alcyoneus, a galaxy sixteen million light years in size. Alcyoneus however is a radio galaxy, a body somewhat different to the likes of IC 1101 and the Milk Way.

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astronomy, science

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